Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Chapter 3 centers on Sambo art, a genre of art that utilized racist imagery on everyday objects. Sambo art presented Black and white people in oppositional terms, characterizing the former as deceitful, ugly, evil, and uncivilized. Gates argues that Sambo images, which were easily consumed, digested, and internalized, formed part of a rhetoric of terrorism throughout the Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow eras. The images reinforced the racism of the courts, politicians, journalists, and novelists, normalizing the idea that Black people were subhuman.

Sambo art appeared in varied contexts, including books, trading cards, advertisements, children’s games, potholders, and other everyday objects. Their popularity was such that when a white person encountered a Black person, they already had fixed notions of that person’s character. Gates singles out lynching postcards as a subgenre of anti-Black Sambo imagery. Alongside other racist images and texts, these postcards emboldened white people to commit murder. The visual rhetoric of white supremacy eroded Reconstruction gains and drowned out the achievements of Black people. The New Negro movement, in which Black Americans crafted a counternarrative to white supremacy, strived to subvert these racist stereotypes.

Miscegenation

In this section, Gates argues that the characterization of Black men as sexual predators grew out of irrational fears of miscegenation, or interracial relationships. These fears emerged before the Civil War and grew over time. Caricatures of interracial relationships circulated widely in the antebellum period and during the war. Among the most popular was The Miscegenation Ball of 1864, which depicted Black women dancing with white men. Called “amalgamation” throughout the 19th century, miscegenation violated ostensibly immutable boundaries between white and Black people, or between the “human” and “subhuman.” White supremacists warned against the propagation of “hybrids,” which they viewed as detrimental to both races. As Gates observes, 19th-century writers linked the threat of miscegenation to the idea of Black men raping white women. Images of the over-sexual, uncontrollable Black man also proliferated in this period and remained popular through the first half of the 20th century.

The “Natural” Propensity to Rape

The racist trope of the Black man’s innate predisposition to rape supported Jim Crow policies. For example, white people opposed integrated public transportation out of fear that it would increase the risk of rape for white women. White supremacists also used rape as a common explanation for the need for lynching, as evidenced by an 1892 editorial titled “More Rapes, More Lynchings,” in the Memphis Daily Commercial. The editorial not only described the “natural” inclination of Black men to rape white women, but also presented white women as weak and defenseless against Black male aggression. It also argued that the structures that kept Black men in check had been destroyed when enslavement ended. Gates interprets the stereotype of the Black rapist in Freudian terms, calling it “a classic instance of repression and projection: the repression of the frequency of rape during slavery” (146). Indeed, DNA analysis reveals that enslavers regularly raped enslaved people. By the turn of the century, white supremacists not only linked Black sexuality to lynching, but also used it to justify racial segregation.

Blackface

This section interprets the growth of blackface within the context of racial violence against Black men. Blackface grew in popularity at the end of the 19th century, coinciding with the rise of lynchings. Blackface maintained racial hierarchies by promoting racist ideas and playing to white anxieties about Black physicality, sexuality, and masculinity. Some blackface posters depicted lecherous Black men and helpless white women, while others showed clownish Black men and flirtatious white women. Gates presents these images as a form of displacement, with white victimizers depicting Black victims of lynching as aggressors.

The Birth of a Nation

This section focuses on D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), originally titled The Clansman. Released at the height of Jim Crow, commentators often refer to the film as one of the most racist ever produced in Hollywood. Using white actors in blackface, the film presented Black people as unintelligent, sexually aggressive toward white women, and overly ambitious. Black people are the enslavers in Griffith’s film, while white people are the enslaved. In one scene, Black politicians drink whisky and eat chicken while enacting a statute legalizing interracial marriage. As Gates observes, these propagandistic tropes not only had their roots in the Reconstruction era, but also projected white fears about Black political engagement and interracial relationships. Another scene shows a Black man attempting to rape a white woman, who jumps off a cliff. Yet another focuses on a white man who saves his sister from a Black suitor with the help of the Ku Klux Klan. Audiences flocked to theaters to see Griffith’s film. After a private White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson famously claimed that it depicted “a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South” (155). Although The Birth of a Nation sparked one of the most important protests against Jim Crow and swelled the membership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), it also attracted new members to the Ku Klux Klan and fed anti-Black racism. The New Negro movement that emerged a few years later, today called the Harlem Renaissance, not only transformed the image of Black people in white popular culture, but also race relations in the US.

The United States of Race: Mass-Producing Stereotypes and Fear

This section consists of mass-produced images of Black people as thick-lipped, unintelligent, and sexually dangerous. These negative stereotypes formed part of the visual rhetoric of white supremacy that characterized the post-Reconstruction period.